If You Build it,They Will Lay Eggs

Memorial day came and went and now there is a chicken pen in our backyard. It only cost two pints of blood each to mosquitos. It's hard to say if the chicks like it, they don't do much.

We Built a City and We Destroyed a City

This natural disaster was brought to you in part by the Sciencenter in Ithaca. It was nice to have Nolan feeling better.

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A Journal of a Sunday

Two Small Anecdotes about My Boys

First, for dinner toight Gerret requested pepperoni, cheese and crackers. I gave him an even amount of each. Near meal's end he displayed his remnants with which he made a giant cracker sandwich that consisted of everyone of his crackers and his last piece of cheese. He ate it all, but I still don't understand why he chose to eat each ingredient separately except form saving one slice of cheese to be consumed with 4 Ritz crackers.

Nolan likes signs. I'm not sure why. Maybe he'll go into Advertising. In any case, we try, as a family, to do a campfire each Friday night. It's a tradition we're trying to establish. This picture is of the sign/announcement Nolan made for anyone and everyone. He had Lindsay post it at the front of our driveway so drivers can see. We haven't attracted any strangers with it yet, but I'm sure the day will come.

Poor Nolan

This is Nolan at 7 am, again at 3:20 pm, and finally at 11 pm. He's had an off day (though disappointingly He was all better for a few hours earlier this evening and now has fallen back into his fever again). His fevers always run high, but I still worry every time. Hopefully tomorrow will prove better.

You Know There's a Tornado Warning Right?

That's what I asked Lindsay and, bless her heart, she still decided to meet me after work to go walking through Cornell's Botanical Garden, a part of Cornell Plantations.
It was 80 degrees with high winds and blue skies and a tornado warning. We pulled into our parking spot at Cornell, unloaded, began setting up the stroller, and the sky darkened. One drop. Two drops. A million drops. Hail. We all raced to throw everything back in the van and then rode out the sudden onset of a storm inside. We hoped this was a small passing bit. I checked the weather map and it seemed like it would end in just a minute. Maybe two. And in three it was over.
The skies were blue and sunny with not a sign of further storming or tornadoes.
Lindsay and I love the Cornell campus. It is of singular beauty and Lindsay had really wanted to go see the gardens. I'm glad she did. It was beautiful and I was more than happy to spend it with family. There was a giant flower the size of my hand (and it's not like I have dwarfish hands or anything). Something called the Masterwort which just made me laugh, and two peppers that sounded like amazing dares.
I had a good time.

The Thing that Should Not Have Been

Monday night was one of those, 'You've got to be kidding me' moments.
I've told this story a few times now, always to shock, amazement, curiosity and laughs from my listeners, so I trust any readers herein will appreciate the content.
So we went shopping on Monday night. We went as a family and, after discussing gas mileage, we decided to take Lindsay's van. Our drive down into Ithaca was quiet and uneventful. A typical 25 mile journey to the supermarket (that's one-way mind you, NOT round trip).
We headed into the store at about five of eight o'clock and got a quick bite to eat (see the previous entry about Gerret's fortune cookie from the meal) before pursuing and completing our shopping. Again, fortune cookie aside, there was nothing really of note about our journey even up to the point that we loaded the groceries in the van, loaded ourselves in the van, and backed up. When we put the car into drive, that's when it happened.
BUMP!
I looked at Lindsay and her wide green eyes looked back at me. Our minds were racing. Couldn't have been a person, we'd checked. There was no one around. Lindsay pulled forward and I confirmed as she went that it was not a person. Thankfully not a person. Not a car either. It hadn't been a BUMP of contact, but rather an up and over BUMP. Something'd gone under my rear passenger tire.
I kept watching out my mirror, but it was 9:20 pm. The light was conciliatory at best and the parking lot lamps did little to illuminate the shape or color of whatever we'd hit. Indeed we had hit something, that was unarguable. It was in the parking lot behind us now; a black lump of something.
At first I thought it was a crow. But that was stupid. We were going like 5 miles an hour, it would've had to lay down on the ground and just wait to be hit. Something was flapping though, like a wing.
My next thought was a black plastic bag of something. My mind tried to recall any black bag that may have fallen out thenback of the van as I'd loaded groceries in, but there wasn't one. Lindsay confirmed, no black plastic bag. So maybe somebody dropped one there. At didn't make sense eiher, no one was near us. There was one family on the other side of our parking lane—they walked over to check out what we'd hit, so they knew what it was, and I knew from theirnreaction (dark and silhouetted as it was) that it didn't belong to them—and no one else until after we'd pulled out.
We were coming to the exit now, but something—curiosity or responsibility to make sure it wasn't something important—told me we should circle around and drive by again. Lindsay obliged, and I never took my eye off the black lump all the way around.
As we neared the object again, slowly coming up on it as we traveled down the lane, I began to hang my head out the window like a dog. Here it was, closer and closer. It was almost all curiosity at this point and then—I couldn't believe it. It couldn't have been. Shouldn't have been.
There, curled on it's back, mouth open, tail wagging in the wind, a giant groundhog. A giant groundhog!? That didn't make any more sense than a crow. We'd been going 5 miles an hour. It mad eno sense, and then in a flash it made perfect sense.
Before we'd left for shopping Lindsay had said Cocoa, our dog, had been circling her van all day, barking intermittently. True enough, when I'd gotten home there she was circling the van, and I remember getting down on my hands and knees and checking under the van and there'd been nothing there.
Then my mind remembered a big groundhog burrow that had recently been created right underneath my propane tanks (and which I'd promptly flooded with water and reburied). Cocoa had chased that groundhog back down it's hole and then circled the hole for hours.
We hadn't suddenly backed over a groundhog. This was the groundhog from back home, from 25 miles away.
Cocoa had caught the groundhog hiding under Lindsay's van and circled it, threatened it, barked at it, before the groundhog had finally sought shelter the only place it could think—up. It had crawled up into the engine and there it had been as we drove down. It sat in our engine for 25 miles, baking and being exposed to noise and car fumes. I have no idea at what point the groundhog died, but I do know that as we were pulling out of the store parking lot it fell out of the engine—finally—only to be flattened by our tire on our way.
There is no moral to this story, just craziness. 25 miles with a large groundhog under the hood. Beat that story if you can.

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